8 Critical Digital Marketing Skills Every Marketer Needs
What are the digital marketing skills that distinguish a professional marketer among his/her colleagues? What marketing qualifications are necessary to keep up with the fast-paced marketing world?
What skills do marketers need to plan and implement effective digital marketing campaigns? Keep reading to find out!
The 8 Critical Digital Marketing Skills
This is the kind of question that may spring to mind for someone who has yet to embark on a marketing career for the first time.
Starting a marketing career depends highly on a combination of hard and soft skills which are the two categories that guarantee your success in such a promising field.
Compassion, communication, honesty, and leadership are marketing’s soft skills that make a resilient and holistic marketer.
However, in this article, we will concentrate on practical hard skills.
1. Copywriting
The first of our digital marketing skills “Copywriting” is a creative stage in creating an advertisement.
The copywriter takes part in the entire process of its creation, most often writing texts and scripts for TV and radio spots, internet creations (such as banners), and texts for websites, advertising brochures, leaflets, etc.
A copywriter should know the needs of consumers and their behavior, the art of persuasion, and be both original and inventive.
Nowadays, copywriting is not only creating typical advertising content, scenarios, etc. it is also creating texts for emerging and existing websites, creating thematic and positioning articles.
Comprehending the fundamentals of copywriting would be extremely beneficial to you.
In general, the qualities of a clever copy can be summarized in:
- Genuine
- Easily perceivable.
- With a compelling call-to-action (CTA).
✒️ A related article: What Is Copywriting? Every Single Info. You Need to Know
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a series of activities delivered with the purpose to improve a website’s ranking in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other web search engines, via natural (organic) result pages (SERP), instead of through sponsored content.
SEO focuses on the technical side of a website, such as improving the architecture and metadata; it also applies to content, with the goal of rendering it more informative and meaningful to visitors.
Technical foundations of the site infrastructure:
- Weight and initial page load (highly important)
- A domain name, HTML code, crawlers…etc.
- Site’s form and quality
- Data tree structure and architecture.
On-site Optimization:
On-site or on-page optimization refers to the set of practices meant to enhance the standards of a website’s content. Accordingly, the keyword strategy and a few other aspects should be refined:
- Meta data (keyword(s) and Meta description)
- Title tag
- HTML Markup (Semantic markup)
- URLs
- Page content (Body)
- Internal mesh (internal links)
Off-site optimization: external links
Alternatively, the off-page practices compose of anything in relation to the structure of a site, and therefore includes the links that redirect to a page therein:
- Sources of external links (inbound links from acknowledged sites will be more visible by Google).
- Link anchor (used to create hyperlinks).
The number of links is also a factor, but we highly advise focusing on the quality of the links rather than quantity.
User Experience (UX)
This is the last element that Google will take into consideration. However, others believe that if you desire to win positions in the first search results, this argument must be treated seriously.
There are many significant SEO standards that can be distinguished:
- Appearance and quality
- Rebound rate
- Conversion rate
- User journey.
3. Spreadsheets
If you work in marketing, you almost certainly will be working with databases.
Spreadsheets are used to generate the majority of documents, such as calendar organizer templates, social networks calendars, SEO audits, and monitoring dashboards.
By using formulas, spreadsheets can help you organize complicated business and accounting information in a systematic format. It is an excellent method to keep track of and report on your data, ideas, and plans.
Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are two popular spreadsheet programs that you may indeed be working with.
Some people get intimidated once they hear “spreadsheet”. As a marketer, you are not supposed to be a mastermind in excel sheets, but you should be at least reached the intermediate level. By “intermediate level” I mean that you can deal with:
- Create Excel tables.
- Create Charts.
- Pivot tables and pivot charts.
- Name and define ranges.
- Create dropdown lists.
- Perform data validation.
- Create conditional formatting.
Even when your work does not focus on data analysis, you’ll have to analyze your data, monitor your progress, and write reports on your marketing efforts. It’s a great step forward if you have the chance to streamline the process by using pre-made templates.
We recommend that a marketer expert should have the following excel templates (among many) to organize and monitor the marketing plans:
- Task Timeline
- Gantt Chart
- To-do list (Task planner)
- KPI tracker.
- Digital marketing plan.
These are all well-thought-out and have been planned and refined based on years of experience working with a variety of fields ranging from small businesses to Forbes magazine corporations.
4. Email Marketing
Businesses have relied on email to convey their information and directly reach out to potential customers. Thus, understanding the basics of email marketing, as well as how email drip campaigns can be planned, is crucial for every marketer.
✒️ A similar article on this subject: 15 Email Marketing Success Tips
Email marketing is a branch of the marketing strategy based on behavioral segmentation. Email marketing aims to provide potential buyers with a positive learning experience during their customer’s journey.
This technique can be very helpful to support, up-selling, and cross-sell the goods by using innovative customized content.
Significance of email marketing
Email is still having its applicability, even with the widespread use of marketing via social platforms. A survey conducted by Smart Insights reveals that email has a conversion rate of 2.4% compared to 1.8% for direct conversion.
With respect to inbound marketing tactics, to provide your prospects with adequate content at the proper moment, a well-designed email marketing strategy is essential.
Let’s review some statistics on the email marketing approach, released by (Content Marketing Institute, 2020):
- Email newsletters are the most common form of content marketing for 81% of B2B marketers.
- Email is one of the top free organic traffic to 87% of the digital platforms for B2B marketers.
- Over 90% of content marketers believe that email engagement is the most important metric for measuring their content success.
5. Digital Marketing Analysis
Marketing analysis is the very first step in the marketing development of a company. This crucial step in setting up a product or service allows you to match your offer with demand.
Marketing analysis is therefore a key element in the success of a project, it makes it possible to assess, study and understand the needs and expectations of a target population. It takes the form of an investigation.
Preoccupied with data handling can appear to be just another soft skill, however, it is quite the opposite. It’s a hard skill that necessitates the collection of data that can be utilized to make further decisions.
✒️ Relevant article: My 13 Favorite Key Performance Indicators
The following are some indispensable data analytic applications for digital marketers:
- CrazyEgg
- Google Analytics
- Quintly
- Convertable
- Facebook Insights
- Kissmetrics
- Twitter Analytics
- Instagram Insights
- LinkedIn Analytics
- Pinterest Analytics
- Youtube Analytics
Different social listening tools, such as IFTTT, Hootsuite, Brand24, and Mention, are often used by businesses to monitor their results. Companies may use social listening to monitor what their target audience is saying about them on social platforms.
As a result, it’s critical for marketers to understand the morphology of key analytical measures, which may include:
- Applying statistics whenever required.
- Gathering data.
- Writing Report results in a comprehensible format.
- Run data into mathematical functions.
- Harnessing domain knowledge.
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6. Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system (or CMS) is a computer program that allows creating a work environment for the creation and administration of content, mainly on web pages, by administrators, editors, participants, and others.
The said system comprises two supporting pillars: Content Delivery Application (CDA) and Content Management Application (CMA).
Any marketer should be familiar with various CMS sites such as WordPress, Hubspot, and Wix.
You may not need to be an expert in using any of these platforms, but having a clear understanding of the CMS can make it easier for you to adapt to working for a company or client that uses it.
A content management system (CMS) offers a framework for creating various sites on the internet, such as blogs, forums, online stores, and databases.
7. Martech
Marketing can be executed through a variety of channels. It can be via traditional or modern digital marketing systems. any category of hardware, platform, or Software as a Service (SaaS) that you purchase and employ in support of your marketing strategy can be defined as Martech.
Workflow automation and Customer Relation Management (CRM) systems are the most convenient examples of what we know as Martech.
The question is: Why this Martech has become so critical for marketers?
My answer is simply because marketing technology has thrived in the last decade, and turned to be a practical tool to improve your marketing and sales strategies.
Also, the Martech Stack refers to the arsenal of technology that marketing experts use to adjust and refine their marketing tactics through the customer’s journey.
Some of these Martech Stack include Data cleansing, reporting, adverts delivery, and lead nurturing, such as lead qualification to lead data.
8. Social Media Marketing Skills
While we are about to close our talk on digital marketing skills, take a look at these statistics rendered by Hootsuite:
- Social media platforms gained 490 million users this year (that’s a 13.2% increase, year over year; the previous year’s growth was only 7.2%).
- 4.2 billion people use social media around the world (i.e., 53.6% of the planet’s total population).
- 44.8% of global internet users used social media to search for brand information in 2020.
The social media marketer watches over the reputation of the brand, and business on the Internet and on social networks.
Based on these strategic axes, he sets up an action plan (social media planning): SEO optimization, identification and retention of influential bloggers, publication of content, customer loyalty.
The social media marketer precisely follows the evolution and results of these different actions using web analytics tools, audience measurement tools, or statistics (e.g. Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Radarly…etc.)
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In Conclusion to Digital Marketing Skills
Not everybody is a good fit for the digital marketing field. These abilities, however, can be mastered. You have access to all of the knowledge and resources you need.
The open-minded marketers should be lifelong learning candidates who are eager to build and invest in new digital marketing skills as the industry grows.
It’s all about putting in the time and effort to acquire these 8 hard digital marketing skills. The growth of digital marketing skills will remain data-based and competitive in the foreseen future.
Digital marketers will need to keep being inventive in their content creation, but they will also need the skills and resources to track the progress of each effort.
